


Devices and Desires

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 04:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21332275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: An abandoned workshop. A broken clock. One who will never be two again.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	Devices and Desires

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Механизмы и мечты](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22424944) by [Alre_Snow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alre_Snow/pseuds/Alre_Snow), [WTF_Warhammer_Legions_2020](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WTF_Warhammer_Legions_2020/pseuds/WTF_Warhammer_Legions_2020)

A thin shaft of light illuminates a table padded with velvet, curious tools arrayed in an outward radial - lathes, pliers, various lengths of file, a calliper. Each is dulled silver, drinking in the luminance rather than reflecting it, ensuring no glare or refraction disturbs the artisan’s concentration on his work. He takes them up without looking, each in their turn. Their arrangement changes as they are replaced and exchanged, yet he finds them again each time they are required.

He hunches over the workbench, his oversized hands impossibly gentle as they play upon the heart of a golden timepiece. Delicate cogs and wheels ease into position. Gears so small, so intricate that they are barely visible to the unmodified human eye settle into place, followed soon after by ever more minuscule pieces.

The tools, too, grow ever thinner, ever-increasing in complexity. He takes up an instrument of oilstone, then of crystal, then a matter-lathe, then a quill of glossy black feathers, then his breath itself - a single exhalation - to tune the device.

To create something of true mastery, one must imbue the object with an essence of the self, a sacrifice of _anima_ as the first philosophers scarred by the Age of Strife came to know it.

A creak of poorly-oiled hinges. The scent of camphor and aged wine.

He does not look up from his work to acknowledge the presence behind his left shoulder. He never acknowledges it. He is aware of it, and believes that one day, truly, one day, there will be time to talk… but not today. He has to finish the clock. He does not know where the compulsion comes from. Something terrible will happen if he does not. Something dear to him will be forever lost.

‘You, of all, most resemble your father, I think.’ The voice is ancient, cracked, mottled with wisdom and humour. ‘Who are you today?’

‘I am me,’ the clockmaker lies.

‘Teleology and nonsense,’ came the reply. ‘A meaningless question. You are right to give me a meaningless answer.’

Those great hands, knotted with scars, burns - callouses from implements less delicate but equally precise as those that lay upon the velvet - began to tremble. It is well that the clockmaker had put down his weapons. His craft-tools, he meant. Not weapons. Not that.

‘You do not belong here,’ he says, trying to banish the presence. A laugh greets the pronouncement, bitter.

‘True. Do you remember, then?’

A throne. A throne of blazing light. The electric tang of earthed power, the creeping dread of a soul unravelled, a feeling so inimical that it can never be forgotten. The power of creation commands worthy awe, but the power of _destruction_... well, that is a thing of dread. But what is dread but involuntary awe? The concepts flow back and forth in an ouroboros of understanding, forever eating their own tails.

‘Look at me,’ the voice commands.

The clockmaker cannot. He cannot turn from his creation, lest it breaks, lest it disappears, lest it goes away and leaves him alone, alone, alone.

‘The room is dark,’ he croaks from a closing throat, ‘I cannot see you.’

‘Then we shall have light.’

Back the curtains, black satin drawn away on copper rails, a dam of sunlight that bursts upon the room. The clockmaker blinks in the sudden illumination. He looks about himself and wonders - was it always so cramped? Were the shelves always so full of broken toys? Here, a wind-up soldier in a spatter of greenish blues. Here, a model for a ship that he must have seen, once. A litany of unfinished work.

He drags his eyes to the window, feeling the slow tears crawl down his cheeks as he does so. There is a sky beyond, a sky of aching blue, lit by a triumphant sun. The wings of a grand palace stretch away to the horizons. It is so familiar, so very familiar, and yet the name will not come to his lips.

He strains to name the place. He looks to the presence for aid, and that feels as natural as breathing. It was once. It will always be so.

Even if the man we look up to, with tears in our eyes, has been dead ten millennia as his gambit turned back and burned him up, flesh and soul, like a candle to heaven. Oh, the fire, the golden fire and its hunger. We can never forget that. We can never.

But his face. His face is hazy. Indistinct. There is a suggestion of a smile, of knowledge, of bushy brows and a grey beard. We are made never to forget, and yet we have.

The clockmaker tumbles from his chair, his knees bloodied against the unyielding pine floor. The surge of memory forces a sob from his mighty chest, trawling it up from the very bottom of his heart, a thing that he had thought to make stony and hard, to make unassailable and immune, and if not to do that then to close it up and give it away, to leave behind that fathomless grief.

Broken toys fall from shelves. They rattle and crash, their paint smudged and defaced. The wind-up warrior cracks across his breastplate: something fierce shines through the breach.

‘Who are you?’ The voice is demanding, now. The light burns fierce through the window. Smoke curls from seared curtains.

Scrabbling across the floor, the clockmaker reaches the legionnaire sundered in miniature. He breaks away the bottom half, casting it aside to reveal the treasure within: a key, ornate, golden and gilded, filigreed with thunderbolts. It is hot in his palm as he turns towards the chamber door.

He cannot rise. The blackened satin vomits smog, thick and cloying. He understands in that moment that it has always stood between him and the outside, that it has drawn about him and made of him a prisoner - and now it reaches for him once more, to drag him back into the dark. Smoke coils about his legs like the intimacy of a serpent’s crushing embrace, crushing his bones, wringing the life from him for the later feast.

‘Who are you?’

The clockmaker cries out. He pulls himself across the floor as the smoke winds its way up his thighs, wrapping tenderly about his waist. The numbness spreads. It would be so easy to give in, to let it take him back into the comforting midnight, to be unaware again, to be himself and nothing more.

‘I do not know!’ he cries out, in pain and alarm. ‘I do not know! Please!’

And suddenly, he recalls the burning of the key, how it scars his palm. The key. Always the wretched key. A key, they say, wounded the King before he fell. His locks had come unsprung and all his cogs had come out. Not that we are innocent. We laid one at his feet, broke another in our hands, did we not?

_That was me,_ the clockmaker begs. _No,_ the clockmaker replies, _It was you._

With a savage effort, he wrenches back, the key like a thunderbolt in his fist. He swings it like a blade and away comes the smoke, severed tendrils already budding into new life as they recoil. Soon a new army will march upon him, and from them there will be no escape.

‘Who are you?’

The clockmaker breaks free. He comes to his feet, staggering towards the chamber door. The question is lightning behind his eyes, thunder in his ears.

The key slides home. Tumblers turn with agonising slowness. Bolts withdraw with majesty.

And then he is through, gasping, struggling for breath, through to the other side.

It is a room identical to the one before. But it is more real, somehow - more solid. Dust covers the shelves, spiderwebs are run in intricate bands across the ceiling. There is a glint of rust beneath. The table is bare of tools, bare of any decoration save the rough warping of aged wood, faded stains of spilt paint and marks where a hammer or saw swung or cut untrue.

He looks back through the chamber door. He sees himself standing there, a dire reflection. Over its left shoulder, the faceless presence hovers. There is something like pride in those hazy eyes.

‘Who are you?’ the presence asks for the final time.

The other meets the clockmaker’s eye squarely. He is part of a different world, the same as that of the kind old ghost. He cannot cross the threshold. One cannot be two once more, nor ever again. He nods.

‘I am Alpharius,’ the clockmaker replies, but even as the words leave him, they ring hollow.

Understanding dawns, like the sun through a tower window.

‘No,’ the presence chuckles as the door swings shut. ‘You are not.’


End file.
